


gaslit

by ToxicPineapple



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Body Image, Eating Disorders, Gen, Introspection, Negative Body Image, Past Abuse, Suicidal Ideation, This really isn't a happy fic LOL, Trans Oma Kokichi, mentions of abuse, mentions of manipulation, that one's just for flavour though lol i'm cis, vent - Freeform, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 08:35:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28348524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToxicPineapple/pseuds/ToxicPineapple
Summary: it helps sometimes when kokichi thinks about all the other people that they hurt-- not in the sense that kokichi is happy that they hurt them, because god he isn’t, but it tells him that at least he isn’t crazy. at least he didn’t imagine the gaslighting and the isolation, the way they convinced kokichi that his friends were all theirs and that they were in the right, always, and that everything they did was okay because they had borderline personality disorder, that they had childhood trauma,and even has kokichi looks at his body in the mirror and thinks, i’m fucking dying, aren’t i, isn’t that so funny, he remembers how they used to message him about their eating struggles after he shared about his own, laughing about how they only realised they had an eating disorder when he talked about it.kokichi can’t help feeling like he was the one in the wrong, sometimes, all the time, even though he hates them with everything inside of him, and every day he wishes that he’d told everybody everything all at once, turned every single person against them like they probably think that he did.---kokichi stares at himself in the mirror and ponders what's become of him.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	gaslit

**Author's Note:**

> if you or a loved one is struggling with an eating disorder, please seek professional assistance.
> 
> if you are contemplating suicide, or even just passively thinking that things might be better if you were dead, please seek professional assistance.
> 
> my family is all aware of what i'm going through right now, and so is my therapist. i'm getting help. please do the same for yourself :)

it’s become standard procedure now, before kokichi gets into the shower, to close the bathroom door with a quiet click and stare at his naked body in the mirror that hangs over the bathroom sink, hands wrapped around his chest, thumbs brushing over the dips in his ribcage, where there used to be a soft pillow of flesh but there is now a cave, small but prominent, highlighted the faded yellow bathroom light.

showering used to be something like what kokichi imagined it would be like to dance over hot coals, a quick shot past the mirror to avoid looking at his chest or between his legs, biting his lip as he nearly slips on the slick floor of the bathtub with how fast he gets into the shower. it was uncomfortable and he did it best when he was dissociated; if kokichi pretended hard enough he was the main male protagonist of  _ your name,  _ waking up in a body that wasn’t his, staring out into the eyes of a stranger.

(except that it was his body, and his eyes, and it wasn’t a fun look into the life of someone else but rather kokichi’s every day, and no matter how fast he went past the mirror he couldn’t erase the reflection of himself in the shower head.

it’s fine, though. there are long scars down his chest now where the biggest source of discomfort used to reside, and kokichi is too short to come too far above the sink, so he can stand staring at himself for hours without any of that.

…well, maybe that’s more of a problem, actually.)

nowadays when kokichi catches sight of himself he pauses, and he stares, and his hands come down to wrap around his torso and rest on his hips, where the bones jut out, and then they brush over that awful dip at his waist, and then he takes a moment to suck in his stomach and count each of his ribs, fingers dancing like he’s playing the xylophone. despite how long it’s been since kokichi got top surgery he still feels least like himself in these moments when he’s standing and staring at his body in the mirror.

though this time it’s less because of what he has that he shouldn’t, and more because of what he doesn’t that he should.

kokichi wonders how long it will be until it sounds like running his knuckles over prison bars every time he rubs his curled fists over his chest. it used to be that when he wrapped his left hand around his right wrist, his thumb and middle finger could barely touch, but now his middle finger nearly reaches the seat of his thumbnail, and the bone of his wrist digs into the middle of his finger, and sometimes during lectures he’ll put both of his hands under the table and curl his fingers around his wrist, just because he can, just to make sure that he’s real, he’s not imagining himself fading away into the wall.

he’s no stranger to hunger, sometimes when kokichi was growing up his foster mother would send him to bed without dinner for no real reason, and sometimes the food would be unsubstantial but asking for more felt like taking space (and kokichi loves taking space, but he hated it in that house, hated feeling large, greedy, needy) so he went to sleep with his stomach eating itself from the inside.

but this kind of hunger is different, it’s self imposed, no matter how much kokichi isn’t actually trying to starve himself-- he doesn’t want to have an eating disorder, doesn’t want to be like one of those girls who he sees in pictures online who always look so grotesque, but sometimes the anxiety rips through him and there’s no real reason for it other than the fact that he remembered a name, or the type of music they used to listen to, or he realised that they like something that he likes, and then even if he has a plate of his favourite food in front of him, he can’t bring himself to do so much as swallow the bite in his mouth.

kokichi grew up poor, he’s far from the type to want to waste food, but his eyes these days are bigger than his stomach and when he goes to the grocery store looking he sees things and he knows logically that he likes them so he buys them, and then they go into the fridge at home and they sit there for weeks and weeks while kokichi thinks, every so often, about eating them, but can never build the motivation to do so--

and then by the time he’s picked himself up well enough for it, they’ve gone bad, and then, well, kokichi can’t make himself eat anything at all, after that.

it’s an icky feeling, knowing that he  _ could’ve  _ eaten something that he didn’t, tastes all bitter and black with regret, and more than once kokichi has found himself sitting on the kitchen floor at three in the morning eating just expired food in the dark, crying because he feels disgusting and overwhelmed and there’s really nothing that he can do to expunge the feelings, no matter how many gulps of water he takes between mouthfuls of food.

maybe if kokichi tore his skin from his body, he would feel less gross-- but that way he would only be thinner, and kokichi already hates the way his collarbone protrudes from his chest, hates looking at himself from the side and seeing the way his stomach and chest are at a ninety degree angle, aside from that little pouch where his uterus rests. kokichi almost feels like he’s going crazy, because he knows that he’s skinny, he’s too skinny now, he’s never been able to feel his ribcage quite like this before, but then he looks down at his thighs and observes the lack of the gap there and he thinks that he’s imagining things, making them up for attention,

except that the only people kokichi tells are the ones who can’t do anything about it, the idea of receiving professional help for a problem like this isn’t so bad but kokichi doesn’t want the whole world and their mother to know, and every time kokichi tries to open his mouth on it he chokes up and he stops and he goes to find a bread roll to shove in his mouth and chew until it tastes like sawdust, because how do you even say that, that you have an eating disorder, and not because you think you’re fat or you’re scared of being fat or being fat is anything less than being beautiful because you  _ know  _ that being fat isn’t the opposite of being attractive, it’s not about being attractive at all, it’s just the anxiety that’s so potent and strong that it makes you feel sick.

kokichi feels sick, all the time, every day, like he’s going to throw up.

and he knows logically that he was being gaslit, that the hours he spent wondering  _ am i really going to be the one to apologise this time, all i did was express a boundary, i didn’t call him passive aggressive as an attack i just felt like he was being passive aggressive, i was just trying to communicate, i was just trying to have fun with somebody else for a change,  _ were all spent that way because of their manipulation, because they were an abusive person and kokichi is lucky that they’re gone.

but at the same time he can’t help wondering if maybe they were the victim, if maybe he was the one who was bullying and mistreating them, if maybe they were in every way the saint that they painted themself as, and he wasn’t manipulated at all, he was just,

selfish,

and mean,

and jealous.

sometimes kokichi sits down with his food and he pushes it around with his fork, and his stomach turns while he tries to convince himself why he should eat it, and he pulls out his cell phone and he sees a friend mentioning something that  _ might  _ have to do with them, that they  _ might  _ like, that  _ might  _ be something that kokichi’s friend talked about or did with them, and then his entire stomach gets cold and he gags, and he gags again, and his eyes get all teary but he can’t stop gagging, but he can’t throw up either because there’s nothing in his stomach so he just leans over the table and wonders what it was like before, back when he wasn’t living like this, when even the smell of foods he liked wasn’t enough to make him start choking on his own tongue.

there are mornings where kokichi wakes up early and rolls over onto his side and takes out his cell phone, and he scrolls tiktok and he texts friends for hours, warm under his blanket, curled into a ball. there’s a gnawing emptiness in his stomach and he knows that he should fill it, but instead he just lies there, wondering if he could turn into dust on the mattress and maybe then he wouldn’t have to eat, wouldn’t have to feel anxious anymore, could just, stay, forever, with some semblance of peace.

and then by the time he slips out of bed the sun has set and it’s seven o’clock in the evening and his hand shakes over the control panel for the microwave and he takes an hour to eat a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and by the time he finishes eating all the chicken and the vegetables his stomach is full, and his broth is cold, and he eats the noodles one at a time between sips of water while staring at his phone, wishing that he could just be normal again.

it helps sometimes when kokichi thinks about all the other people that they hurt-- not in the sense that kokichi is happy that they hurt them, because god he isn’t, but it tells him that at least he isn’t crazy. at least he didn’t imagine the gaslighting and the isolation, the way they convinced kokichi that his friends were all theirs and that they were in the right, always, and that everything they did was okay because they had borderline personality disorder, that they had childhood trauma,

and even has kokichi looks at his body in the mirror and thinks,  _ i’m fucking dying, aren’t i, isn’t that so funny,  _ he remembers how they used to message him about their eating struggles after he shared about his own, laughing about how they only realised they had an eating disorder when he talked about it.

kokichi can’t help feeling like he was the one in the wrong, sometimes, all the time, even though he hates them with everything inside of him, and every day he wishes that he’d told everybody everything all at once, turned every single person against them like they probably think that he did.

he wishes he’d been crueler, that he’d been aiming to hurt them, not to heal their relationship. if he could go back in time he would let loose on them, tell them everything that they did to him.

not because he thinks they’d care. they don’t care about anybody but themself.

but kokichi can’t stand the idea that they don’t even know.

sometimes kokichi stands in front of the bathroom mirror and he hopes to god that this takes him to the hospital, that he just gets worse and worse and loses pound after pound after pound until there’s almost nothing of him left, because maybe if he’s in a hospital bed, he’ll be able to convince himself that they hurt him.

kokichi is so tired. he’s so afraid of dying, but maybe this all would stop if it killed him.

he wants nothing more than for them never to be happy ever again. he wants them to know what they did to him. and he can’t help being hateful, not just towards them, but towards those of his friends who choose to remain friends with them.

they don’t owe kokichi their loyalty, or whatever, of course they don’t, but.

maybe kokichi thought he was worth more than that. maybe kokichi was just stupid.

after a while of staring at himself, of running his palms over his skin until it tingles, kokichi shakes himself out of it and climbs slowly into the bathtub, drawing the curtain so that he can no longer see himself in the mirror. after he showers, maybe he’ll eat something. more likely he’ll crawl under the covers in his pajamas and get on his phone and lie there until something breaks inside of him and he gets up to eat.

he doesn’t know.

he hopes that what they say in the storybooks is true, though, and that he’ll be okay someday.

**Author's Note:**

> yeah so anyway if you're friends with/a supporter of: [ ao3 user spacejames/tumblr user @bluemoonjupiter (or space-saihara-archive)/discord user bluemoon#1307/twitter user @spacesaihara/the runner of saimota week 2020 ] you are no friend of mine. i feel bad like saying who this vent fic is about but also he's the most manipulative person i've met in my life and he abused me for Several Months(tm) so i'm really. mmmmmm. yeah. i don't want to be friends with you if you're friends with him and if you would support him, then please do not read my content. bless you


End file.
